Bloomington-Normal nonprofits are banding together for a first-of-its-kind Wellness Weekend, with a communitywide festival of arts and humanities programs aimed at examining the impact of mass incarceration.
YWCA McLean County organized the Wellness Weekend as part of its new role as a hub for the statewide program Envisioning Justice. Friday's kickoff event at the Creativity Center in downtown Bloomington includes hands-on mask making with King Moosa, a Bloomington-based “artivist” who uses hip-hop, poetry and visual art to inspire change in the criminal justice system. BCAI Cultural Arts and Humanities, Creative Healing Art Therapy and Silver Back Apparel will also be there from 6-8 p.m., the latter screening T-shirts with the weekend’s theme: Healing is crime prevention.
More artmaking sessions take place Saturday at Illinois Art Station, University Galleries and the Creativity Center. People of all ages and experience can join yoga classes and songwriting sessions. And there is ample opportunity to hear music, too—much of the weekend free and open to the public.
Moosa, whose given name is Brian Harrington, opens for Brooklyn-based experimental musician Matthew Ryals with a hip-hop set at Illinois Art Station on Sunday evening, where attendees will also be able to view masks created throughout the weekend. Ryals and Harrington don’t know one another. And in many ways, you could call their music polar opposites.
Ryals is an improviser who primarily plays modular synthesizer. He was looking to fill in a few tour dates and had heard of Yea Big’s Neuroplasticity, a monthly salon of mostly experimental musicians hosted by Stefen Robinson at Illinois Art Station. The February edition is on Saturday.
“They had this idea of making it a weekend,” Ryals said in an interview for WGLT’s Sound Ideas, “and then this other community event was happening that King Moosa’s a part of. It was very organic.”
Going with the flow is comfortable for Ryals, whose music is primarily improvised. Ryals sets up sound loops through a series of nobs and tubes on a synthesizer; the odds of loving what comes out, he said, is about 50/50.
“Some people say it’s like riding a bull,” Ryals said. “I think it’s kind of true even though I’ve never done that. It is a beast and a little hard to steer at times. I’ve worked quite a lot on developing a personal language and approach with it. Sometimes I get it wrong, but I have a medium high confidence of what’s going to come out.”
And when it’s wrong, Ryals said he leans into that—not wholly unlike steering into an icy patch on a slick road rather than hedging against it. That can lead to happy accidents which, according to Ryals, is why hearing the music live is the best way to experience it (though he did just release a new album, too).
Taking you someplace you're not
It's that care for the atmosphere and creative escape that drew King Moosa to say yes, though it's not his first time crossing the aesthetic aisle. An ongoing project with Clinard Dance in Chicago blends rap, flamenco, tap dance and blues, all forms which, like electronic music, have Afrodiasporic roots—and are born out of resistance.
“I never used to understand abstract art,” said Moosa. “Now I get it. I understand expanding the brain by any means. The fact that we’re both using music to do something—to inspire, to push, to change, to take you someplace that you’re not—that’s the idea of art.”
When he was 14, Harrington was charged and convicted as an adult for what he describes as a gun sale gone wrong.
“There was no prom night for me,” he said. “I was great at basketball; there was no making the basketball team for me. There was no graduating for me. Those moments didn’t happen for me.”
In April 2020, 13 years into a 25-year sentence, Gov. JB Pritzker granted him clemency. In addition to Moosa’s artistic work, he’s a community organizer with the Coalition to Decarcerate Illinois and is particularly passionate about the juvenile justice system.
“Being incarcerated so young, I felt a lot,” he said. “I felt the shame, the regret, the remorse—the will to want to change my reality. I felt the pain of being 400 miles from my parents, living in slave-like conditions.”
Among the Coalition’s projects is an effort to ensure Illinois prisons have clean water. In 2023, the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency issued drinking water violations to 10 state-run facilities, including Pontiac and Stateville Correctional Center.
Stateville, located in Joliet, and Logan Correctional Center in Lincoln are in the process of being closed and rebuilt. Last year's budget allocated $900 million to that project, money Moosa says is better spent on trauma-informed community harm reduction. In his State of the State budget address this week, Gov. Pritzker allocated $16 million dollars proposed for community-based violence. The state spends more than a billion dollars on prisons each year.
“The way that they sold it in the ’94 crime bill was, if we introduce longer sentences, it’s going to deter people from doing crime because we have a safer public. That never happened,” said Moosa. “’Tough on crime’ doesn’t produce the results that we claim we want.”
The goal of Envisioning Justice initiatives is not only to interrogate mass incarceration but offer arts and humanities to heal from the ripple affect that impacts generations of people who have experienced incarceration directly or indirectly. Breaking that cycle is what motivates King Moosa.
“I’m reliving the most traumatic thing that’s happened to me for the purpose of changing lives,” he said. “If you see somebody fighting for a cause that directly affected them on such a level—that’s a different kind of strength.”
YWCA McLean County’s Wellness Weekend takes place Feb. 21-23 at various locations. For a full schedule, visit the Facebook event page. Mask-making sessions are free but require registration. And for those looking for experimental music this weekend, there's lots! Pt.fwd presents Parisian sound artist Franck Vigroux in a free concert at 6 p.m. Friday at University Galleries. Yea Big's Neuroplasticity is 7:30 p.m. Saturday at Illinois Station with Estrogen Molotov, Creatian/Heap and Swim Ignorant Fire. King Moosa opens for Matthew Ryals at 7:30 p.m. Sunday, also at Illinois Art Station. Pre-sale tickets for both concerts are $20, at illinoisartstation.org, or $15 Sunday at the door.
